12 Best CNAPP Platforms for Better Cloud Security

Cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) offers organizations efficient cloud security tools and functionalities to mitigate security threats and risks and protect cloud applications and workloads.

Using services like CNAPP is relevant today, with security threats growing rapidly worldwide.

And with more applications and workloads moving to the cloud, securing these components has become more necessary. At this time, ordinary security solutions are not enough to provide safety to these applications. 

This is where CNAPP proves to be helpful, and thankfully, you can find plenty of CNAPP services in the market.

But how to know which CNAPP platform can actually offer the best-in-class protection? 

To make things simple, I have curated the best CNAPP software to enhance cloud security that you can choose based on your needs. Here is a quick summary of CNAPP Platforms.

What Is CNAPP?

Cloud-native application protection (CNAPP) is a complete cloud-native software platform that helps in monitoring, detecting, and mitigating potential security threats and vulnerabilities. 

Basically, CNAPP provides organizations with tools and functionalities like CWPP, CSPM, CIEM, IAC scanning, etc., to protect cloud applications and workloads from threats. It also combines other capabilities like container scanning, runtime cloud workload protection, and runtime vulnerability scanning to ensure complete protection of the cloud application. 

Furthermore, CNAPP empowers the DevOps and DevSecOps teams to ensure end-to-end cloud and application security throughout the whole CI/CD application lifecycle, right from designing and development to production and deployment. 

In addition, CNAPPs provide complete visibility into access control, workloads, DevSecOps, and configuration to streamline security management and compliance. 

Since it serves as a single security solution, it helps you access reports, perform scanning, and detect threats from a single platform, and minimize any human error. CNAPP not only enables organizations to monitor but also allows them for rapid respond rapidly to misconfigurations and vulnerabilities.

Benefits of CNAPP in Preventing Cloud Risks

The benefits of CNAPP include:

Unified Platform

CNAPP provides organizations with a single platform through which the whole team can collaborate to monitor and identify various minor issues, individual events, and attack vectors. Through an integrated platform, it also provides you with alert and vulnerability solutions to ensure security.

Enhanced Cloud Security

The end-to-end security solution of CNAPP helps them in enhancing overall cloud security. It enables companies to maintain better visibility and risk detection across cloud-native applications, workloads, and services in the infrastructure. 

Real-Time Threat Detection

The real-time threat detection capability of CNAPP is highly useful for cloud security. By utilizing runtime visibility techniques and cloud-native security controls, it can identify anomalies and IOCs quickly, allowing security teams to respond immediately for quick remediation.

Fewer Complexities

Through 360-degree visibility into each activity, CNAPP eliminates the need to monitor multiple points in a cloud infrastructure. Thus, it helps reduce complexities related to configurations, permissions, access controls, etc. CNAPP also analyzes multiple numbers of attributes to find out which issue has the most impact and prioritize security tasks.

High-Speed Protection

As you can integrate CNAPP at every stage of application development and CI/CD, it helps in identifying compliance issues and misconfiguration from the root. It also integrates with the SecOps ecosystem to provide alerts and tickets on different violations and allow security teams to respond to them immediately.

Simplifies Compliance Adherence

With CNAPP integrated into the cloud infrastructure, it becomes easier for organizations to cater to applicable compliance and regulatory requirements.  

CNAPP makes sure your application adheres to PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and various other frameworks, eliminating risks.

Distributes Security Responsibilities 

CNAPP can deploy security control at every level of the DevOps cycle. This enables developers to become more responsible for the security of their workplace and tasks. The implementation of CNAPP can also reduce friction between developers and security teams.

Now, let’s jump right into some of the best CNAPP platforms to simplify and enhance cloud security.

Crowdstrike

Protect your cloud application and workloads with Crowdstrike, which serves as a highly effective and unified cloud security platform. 

This agentless cloud security platform brings onboard Cloud Workload Protection, Cloud Identity Entitlement Management, and Cloud Security Posture Management to protect your cloud estate. 

Crowdstrike is the industry’s first CNAPP platform that brings forward 24/7 managed detection and response for cloud environments. In addition, it provides cloud incident response, platform deployment, and threat hunting. These tasks together help security teams fortify the cloud security of your organization. 

Whether you have multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure, Crowdstrike provides you with complete visibility into every component of your cloud asset. This security platform makes use of Indicators of Attack (IoAs) to identify security breaches and stop them from every point immediately. 

Crowdstrike can curb the chances of accidental exposure, misconfiguration, and other risks through its unique Indicators of Misconfigurations (IoMs) and ensure rapid compliance.

Ermetic

If you want to secure your cloud infrastructure from a single platform without facing any cloud complexity, Ermetic is the CNAPP platform you can try. 

This identity-first CNAPP platform provides you with an agentless solution and has the ability to identify, prioritize, and remediate security and compliance issues. Ermetic works with your AWS, Azure, or GCP infrastructure and lets you streamline the whole cloud security operation for effectively dealing with security flaws. 

The tool offers a fully integrated view of all the cloud assets, applications, and workloads in your cloud platform so that you can control every security aspect. Along with CSPM, CWP, and IaC scanning, this CNAPP includes Kubernetes posture management to boost overall cloud security.

Aqua

Aqua‘s CNAPP solution is suitable for many businesses globally as it provides you complete visibility in your cloud environment to help you identify and fix misconfiguration. 

With its single security platform, you can collaborate with other teams and eliminate any attack across your web application’s lifecycle. Since it integrates with your entire development lifecycle, you can quickly discover and solve vulnerabilities, exposed code, or other issues in your code, build and pipelines, and ensure complete protection. 

Aqua utilizes some exceptional tools like advanced malware protection and software supply chain security to enhance the overall security posture. It can secure your application across clouds, containers, CI/CD pipelines, registries, and serverless platforms and ensure they are completely free of vulnerabilities. 

With Aqua, you can stay perfectly compliant with frameworks like PCI and SOC 2 by frequently auditing your security posture and delivering the findings.

Zscaler

Ensuring the security of your cloud-native applications as well as workloads from building to runtime is easy with CNAPP platforms like Zscaler. It is an agentless cloud security solution that can identify and solve hidden risks spread across your application lifecycle. 

From IaaS, VMs, and containers to dev environments, it gives you 360-degree visibility into your entire cloud by integrating with IDE and DevOps tools. The CNAPP helps improve SOC efficiency by discovering threats and hidden attack vectors and tallying them with other suspicious activities, vulnerabilities, and configuration errors. 

You can easily block future attack paths with this CNAPP, and the credit goes to its intelligent threat protection. You can maintain continuous compliance with your cloud security as it maps your cloud app security posture to CIS, NIST, HIPAA, and other regulatory frameworks for automated compliance reporting.

Prisma Cloud

Prisma Cloud is one of the best CNAPPs that can strengthen the security of cloud applications and workloads of many organizations. 

From identifying security flaws in code repositories and blocking untrusted packages during deployment to protecting workloads in runtime, Prisma Cloud offers security at every step. Using the power of machine learning, this CNAPP platform continuously assesses your cloud assets for misconfigurations and abnormal activities to alert the teams. 

Thanks to Prisma Cloud, you can now defend your cloud application against zero-day vulnerabilities by pushing the boundary of typical visibility and alert prioritization. 

With its complete solution, you not only can enable consistent security across infrastructure but also align your security requirements with future priorities. It takes your security operation to the next level by integrating SOC and workflow to provide user-set alert streaming and logging.

Wiz

Help your cloud development and security team have a unified approach to strengthening your cloud security by leveraging the CNAPP platform by Wiz. 

This is a graph-based and agentless CNAPP platform that scans every component, prioritizes risks, delivers insights, and ensures best security practices across the CI/CD pipeline. 

WIz consolidates top security tools to proactively protect your cloud application and reduce the complexity of creating cloud-native applications. Using automated attack path analysis, it can quickly identify, detect, and respond to all the critical risks and remove blind spots in your security vector. 

This CNAPP promotes a collaborative approach in an organization by eliminating operational silos and allowing every team to eliminate risks in a development lifecycle proactively. Leading organizations use Wiz to increase operational efficiency by removing the issues associated with manual effort for managing risks.

Lacework

With the increase in the need for cloud applications and workload security, using a CNAPP like Lacework is beneficial. It seamlessly integrates with your platform to scan every component in your cloud to protect your application through runtime. 

This CNAPP solution not only enables your team to address the issues with the greatest impacts but also finds unknown threats through behavior-based threat detection capability. Through a unified platform, Lacework automatically gathers evidence and feeds it to compliance platforms to always stay audit-ready. 

By leveraging KSPM and CSPM, you can uncover compromised accounts and respond to threats to secure all your cloud accounts and services. Lacework monitors all the user activity and workloads to learn about cloud behavior and provide alerts if a user deviates from routine behavior.

Runecast

Secure your cloud infrastructure by combining the leading security tools by Runecast. It is one of those effective CNAPP platforms that work on multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises platforms to secure your applications, containers, and physical workloads. 

This CNAPP provides security and compliance at every stage, from application delivery to the development cycle, and eliminates vulnerabilities. It is highly useful in eliminating misconfigurations and configuration drifts across containers, VMs, and multi-cloud infrastructure. 

The Runecast AI Knowledge Automation is one of the primary features that strengthens security by delivering your teams with daily knowledge definition updates. The single-platform view of this platform removes all the silos of maintaining a varied type of monitoring tools and enables your team to secure services and applications to allow your projects to run smoothly.

Plerion

Do you want complete visibility into your cloud-native applications’ lifecycle? Try Plerion. This is a CNAPP that combines the best cloud security solutions like CSPM, CWPP, DSPM, CDR, API security, and others in a single platform to provide you with the security you need. 

Plerion is an agentless CNAPP solution that takes a threat-led and risk-driven approach. This not only helps in mitigating configurations and security issues but also helps you focus on the risks that can pose the biggest impacts. 

Using this solution, you can incorporate appropriate security at every step in your development lifecycle and eliminate the chance of vulnerability that will slow down the performance. It also offers Automated Attack Path Analysis (APA), which helps security teams detect the root cause of the risk along with its risks and impacts on your applications and organization. 

Cyscale

Achieve true cloud-native application and workload protection with Cyscale and prevent them from slowing down due to vulnerability or attacks. By integrating the Cyscale CNAPP platform into your infrastructure, you can enable complete cloud security. 

Like any top CNAPP platform, it also combines tools like CWPP, CIEM, and CSPM to prevent your cloud from misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and data breaches. 

Using contextual analysis and complete visibility in your security, it provides you with real-time cloud security and helps you address significant risks with ease. With this platform, you can apply more than 500 out-of-the-box security controls and automatically run critical compliance checks to meet all the compliance requirements. 

ThreatKey

Recommended by top security experts around the world, ThreatKey serves as a great CNAPP platform that can help your security and IT teams protect your application from any threat. 

Through ThreatKey’s centralized management console, you will get all the tools at your fingertips. This lets you manage misconfigurations and security findings. It continuously looks for emerging threats and security weaknesses and mitigates them quickly to protect the applications and workloads from losing their efficiency. 

You can utilize this CNAPP to streamline and automate all the incident response processes and preserve them to facilitate post-incident analysis. The one-click installation feature is really commendable to easily install on your SaaS and cloud infrastructure without any agent. 

PingSafe

PingSafe is a top-of-the-line CNAPP that you can use to ensure unparalleled protection for your application as well as multi-cloud infrastructure. 

Besides utilizing standard CSPM, CWPP, IaC, and Vulnerability Management tools, PingSafe utilizes KSPM and CDR to protect containers and applications from code to runtime. 

PingSafe also uses a Secret Scanning Engine, which scans billions of commits to detect secrets in code repositories and enable Shift Left security in your cloud infrastructure. 

You won’t face downtimes with your applications or cloud credential leaks as this platform can detect any leaks and alert your security teams to mitigate them. The API-based agentless onboarding and auto-remediation make this CNAPP platform increasingly convenient to use.

Conclusion

Choosing the appropriate CNAPP for your organization can be tough, given a lot of options in the market. 

To simplify this, I have listed some of the best CNAPPs that you can choose based on your organization’s needs to get better cloud security. It will streamline your security tasks and provide ease and speed of threat detection and response. 

You may also explore some best Cloud data protection platforms to keep your data nimble and safe.